Hi everyone,
I am starting (again) to invest after selling most of my portfolio before COVID.
Managed to keep 300k CHF in my savings account during the past turbulent year.
I’m looking for independent investment/wealth management service. No UBS or alike, I am anyway too poor for them. I’ve read of mixed opinions about VZ.
Anyone you trust and or can recommend in the Zurich area?
I’m interested in ETF, bonds, and commodities. I don’t have time to actively manage my portfolio. So I am looking for a balanced risk solution, long term. 2nd and 3rd pillar are already optimized.
Thanks a lot!
1 Like
Any reason why you require such a service? You’ll basically leave 0.4-1.0%/year on the table for something like that. Which is a huge cost longterm.
3 Likes
Good point.
I’ve been giving a lot of thoughts. I know it’s a lot of money, but right now I really lack of time between work (60+ hours/week) and family life.
Also, doesn’t have to be a long term solution, as I can take control of the investment when I have time to focus on it.
So my personal conclusion is that I’d be happy to pay for a good service. But it’s not easy to move around these kind of services. So wanted to hear some honest opinions here.
1 Like
you could:
a) meet one or more professionals of your choice to evaluate such a service and get to know what their actual advice would be for your profile.
b) tell us a bit more about your profile and get some collective advice about how it’s possible doing basically the same the advisor/manager would do, but cheaper and without much more time effort.
c) do both and decide afterwards what fits you best.
btw: i don’t have first-hand experience with such a service, but had a meeting with vz and two others.
Thanks - and good suggestions!
Looking forward to hearing if anyone went for option a) and how was their experience
1 Like
The “ethos” around the forum and community here is guided by a do-it-yourself approach. Since you seem to be at least familiar familiar with “ETFs, bonds and commodities” and are looking for a balanced portfolio, it would seem that you fit that mould.
I’d argue that that doesn’t require complicated portfolio management that - it could easily be done in an hour or two every half year or so.
I also can’t remember the last time I’ve (if ever) that I’ve read about professional (paid-for) investment advice in a positive light on this forum. So I’m not sure how valuable the advice will be, to be honest.
3 Likes
Be wary of “independent advisors”, e.g., VZ, Swiss Life Select or other countless advisors. While their advises are going to the right direction (e.g., invest your savings that you do not need for the next 10 years), they rarely recommend the ‘best products’ but merely the products which will give them a good commission while leaving you in an acceptable / better-than-before situation (e.g., funds with entrance/redemption fees instead of DIY ETFs strategies, etc.).
However, those advisors would usually agree to meet for free so it is no waste of money to have a chat with them and see if your plans are sound.
The best advisors would be paid by the hour, not by commission, but those are quite rare animals I am afraid. Maybe someone around here would have one to recommend in your region.
Also, while I understand you may not trust, I would not underestimate the quality of the advices you can receive on this forum.
7 Likes
I think you first need to assess your risk profile. It looks like you’re a prudent person, and I would take the common advice here of investing 100% in equities with a pinch of salt.
You can open a free account at truewealth.ch and assess your risk profile. Afterwards, the system will propose you a portfolio of different funds/etfs. It will avoid you wasting your time/money seeing someone, as this is all online/free.
And no, I have no affiliation with them, but found their website quite useful and intuitive.
Hi everyone,
and thanks for the time to reply this.
I read all your points.
And to clarify, it’s not that I don’t trust the advice from this forum - actually I’m quite impressed on how clear and helpful the material is. It’s primarily that:
- I don’t have extensive experience in investments
- I am quite risk adverse
And this could be as a consequence of the fact that I come from an humble background, so 300k it’s a lot of money to me.
1 Like
Don’t think anybody does this here.
Common advice is to consider one’s overall wealth/portfolio.
Then when the majority realizes that their 2nd pillar (“bond-like”) accounts for plenty of it, it might just be that it makes sense to direct “100%” of liquid assets into equities (depending on the situation/age).
which is not a bad thing at all. and as @SwissDan and i mentioned/implied, getting the risk profile right is always the first step, without this it’s not even possible to give proper advice.
just as a sidenote: swiss deposit insurance is for up to 100k per bank. having more than that within a single bank/account is a risk in itself, even tho tiny of course.
This was discussed several times on the forum. I am interested if anyone has a good recommendation as I did not see one yet !
Otherwise I second the advice to try robo advisors including a risk assessment. In addition you can ask your current bank for a non-binding proposal. Both should be free and you get 2 different opinions to contrast.
If you are convinced you need to be invested and all that is stopping you is time then you need to find a way. The cost of not doing so becomes more and more expensive each year
In this case, I would think about the right allocation between risk-free investment and risky investments.
For example, if you invest “only” 150k instead of the whole 300k in stocks and leave the rest in a risk-free investment (savings account), the fluctuations of the absolute amounts will be only half as big.
IMHO that would be the easiest way of reducing volatility.
1 Like
I‘ll be somewhat provocative here:
If 300‘000 is a lot of money to you…
…why are you going to waste it on expensive independent investment management?
if we assume a 0.6% fee, i.e. 1.800 CHF a year, helps me to mitigate the risks related to my lack of experience and get me to invest faster, I’m happy to pay for it.
Agree that it’s better not to pay and do-it-myself but that will take time. Also, it’s not gonna be forever, maybe after next year I’ll be comfortable to manage it myself.
So, besides that advice, that I totally get and trust, does someone have experience with independent financial advisory services in Zurich?
Would be just interesting to hear some of the names and if experience was positive or not.
Did you ever play with a demo account from truewealth? I actually did this back and forth to see my risk profile and what it proposed to me but then I decided do invest directly into the exact securities they proposed me.
I really liked the questionnaire and I found that it gave me accurate results. It even proposed commodities to me at the time and I had invested some of my cash into it but in hindsight I must admid that I never really understood them.
Well, i guess you should really consider the following points in that case, as investing can be very difficult for your nerves if you are not used to it:
- get information on how volatile investments can be, especially max. drawdown. Take a 100% equity-strategy and you look at -50%. Even a balanced strategy is at -30% during times of crisis. And don’t think in term of percentage but in term of CHF, -150k for equity and -90k for balanced… and ask yourself the question if you would still be able to sleep at night. Honestly, investing and FIRE is important, but quality of life (and sleep) is more. If you are not sure about your answer - then it might be too risky… and this only leads to making mistakes in difficult situations
- invest on a step-by-step basis so that you get used to it. Say you invest your 300k over a time frame of 3 years, for exemple CHF 100k every year… or something like 8k a month. You won’t get the perfect timing… but it will certainly not be the worst either… and you can get used to it, when the market is moving.
Therefore, it might not be too bad to have a discussion with a good advisor which can point out exactly those things to you… and i agree with you, that it might even be worth paying for it.
just my 2 cents
4 Likes
like last year when he could’ve easily lost 50-70k of that 300 just by staying invested 
I had a guy who walked me through the regular hoops I didn’t want to hear (2nd and 3rd pillar, life insurance, buying property, etc.), then we ended up at a relatively mixed portfolio at TrueWealth, then he later recommended Novia and also others.
For the record, this is the portfolio he came up with early 2020 (someone pls do a back-test 
)
He guy was very honest and thorough, though if you do invest your money with a certain solution, you need to understand it fully, so basically you need to put in the time either way. A managed solution will only make you poorer in the long run by adding fees on top and you might also get a time lock-in.
What’s not so trust-building is that their company and logo and everything is gone and redirects now a new company (called Skybound Wealth Management). No clue about the background of the change but I’m happy to share the contact over PM. He’s still with the company.
I didn’t personally go with them after the TW 0.4% fee scared me off.
1 Like
Are you advocating OP ignores the time in the market mantra and changes his /her mind and stays in cash?